Quote of the day

There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the "thron in the flesh" is needed, the suffering of defects whcitout which there is no progress and nop ascent. CW 12 - par 208

Quote of the day

Our personal psychology is just a thin skin, a ripple on the ocean of collective psychology. The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psyche, and collective psyche moves according to laws entirely different from those of our consciousness. The archetypes are the great decisive forces, they bring about the real events, and not our personal reasoning and practical intellect...The archetypal image decide the fate of man. CW 18 - par 183

Quote of the day

Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, whether outside or inside. He has both in almost devilish perfection. What he lacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature around and within him. He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills. CW 11 - par 870

Quote of the day

It is just the most unexpected, the most terrifyingly chaotic things which reveal a deeper meaning...Gradually breakwaters are built against the surging of chaos, and the meaningful divides itself from the meaningless. When sense and nonsense are no longer identical, the force of chaos is weakened by their subtraction; sense is then endued with the force of meaning, and nonsense with the force of meaninglessness. In this way a new cosmos arises. CW 9 - par 64

Quote of the day

Just as the unconscious world of mythological images speaks indirectly, through the experiences of external things, to the man who surrenders himself wholly to the outer world, so the real world and its demands find their way indirectly to the man who has surrendered himself wholly to the soul; for no man can escape both realities. If he is intent only on the outer reality, he must live his myth; if he is turned only towards the inner reality, he must dream his outer, so-called real life. CW 6 - par 280

Quote of the day

The danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man., particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breadth of nature. He knows a rabbit or a cow only from the illustrated paper, the dictionary, or the movie, and thinks he knows what it is really like--and is then amazed that cowsheds "smell," because the dictionary did not say so. CW 10 - par 882

Quote of the day

No amount of skepticism and criticism has yet enabled me to regard dreams as negligible occurrences. Often enough they appear senseless, but it is obviously we who lack the sense and ingenuity to read the enigmatic message from the nocturnal realm of the psyche. Seeing that at least half of our psychic existence is passed in that realm, and that consciousness acts upon our nightly life just as much as the unconscious overshadows our daily life, it would seem all the more incumbent on medical psychology to sharpen its senses by a systematic study of dreams. Nobody doubts the importance of conscious experience; why then should we doubt the significance of unconscious happenings? They are truly part of our life, and sometimes more truly a part of it for weal or woe than any happenings of the day. CW 16 - par 325

Quote of the day

We should not try to 'get rid' of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is. We should even learn to be thankful to it, otherwise we pass it by and miss the opportunity of getting to know ourselves as we really are. A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it--it cures us. A man is ill, but the illness is nature's attempt to heal him. From the illness itself we can learn so much for our recovery, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless contains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere. CW 10 - par 361

Quote of the day

Perhaps art has no "meaning," at least not as we understand meaning. Perhaps it is like nature, which simply is and "means" nothing beyond that. Is "meaning" necessarily more than mere interpretation--an interpretation secreted into something by an intellect hungry for meaning? Art, it has been said, is beauty, and "a thing of beauty is a joy forever." It needs no meaning, for meaning has nothing to do with art. CW 15 - par 121

Quote of the day

That the greatest effects come from the smallest causes has become patently clear not only in physics but in the field of psychological research as well. How often in the critical moments of life everything hangs on what appears to be a mere nothing! CW 9 - par 408

Quote of the day

The true genius nearly always intrudes and disturbs. He speaks to a temporal world out of a world eternal. He says the wrong things at the right time. Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. The process of transformation has to make a halt in order to digest and assimilate the utterly impractical things that the genius has produced from the storehouse of eternity. Yet the genius is the healer of his time, because anything he reveals of eternal truth is healing. CW 10 - par 1004

Quote of the day

Rational truths are not the last word, there are also irrational ones. In human affairs, what appears impossible by way of the intellect has often become true by way of the irrational. Indeed, all the greatest changes that have ever affected mankind have come not by way of intellectual calculation, but by ways which contemporary minds either ignored or rejected as absurd, and which were recognized only long afterwards because of their intrinsic necessity. More often than not they are never recognized at all, for the all-important laws of mental development are still a book with seven seals. CW 6 - par 135

Quote of the day

The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual. CW 7 - par 305

Quote of the day

For the modern man, a conscious encounter with the autonomous archetypal psyche is equivalent to the discovery of God. After such an experience he is no longer alone in his psyche and his whole world view is altered. He is freed to a large extent from the projections of the Self onto secular aims and objects. He is released from the tendency to identify with any particular partisan faction which might lead him to live out the conflict of opposites in the outer world. Such a person is consciously committed to the process of individuation. Edward F. Edinger. Ego and Archetype. p. 104

Quote of the day

To have the courage to accept a quality which one does not like in oneself, and which one has chosen to repress for many years, is an act of great courage. But if one does not accept the quality, then it functions behind one's back. To see and admit the shadow is part of the problem, to say something has happened to me, something has leaked out.; but the great ethical problem begins when one makes up one's mind to express the shadow consciously. That requires great care and reflection if it is not to have a disturbing effect. M.-L. von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, p. 5

Quote of the day

The dream is a little door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic might which was psyche log before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness f that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral. C.G. Jung, CW 10 - par 304f